In a book, The Book of Hope, which he co-authored with Jane Goodall, Douglas Abrams makes this statement: Creating the human race may be the single biggest mistake evolution ever made.
Our lifestyle and our over-strained planet
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Our deepest loneliness
Harvard psychologist Robert Coles, in describing the French mystic Simone Weil, once suggested that what she really suffered from and what motivated her life was her moral loneliness. What is that? Moral loneliness is what we experience when we ache for moral affinity, that is, for a soulmate, for someone who meets us, understands, and…
Surrendering to love
Perhaps all of Jesus’ invitations to us can be summarised in one word, surrender. We need to surrender to love. But why is that difficult? Shouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world? Isn’t our deepest desire a longing to find love and surrender to it? True, our deepest longing is to surrender…
A single line says it all!
You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. No single line, outside of Scripture, has ever spoken to me as powerfully, as persistently, and as hauntingly, as that line from St Augustine. In essence, it’s Augustine’s life story – and the story of each of our…
Our hypocrisy and our blindness
The subtlety of hypocrisy! How easy it is not to see our own inconsistencies, even as we so clearly see the faults of others. Are we wilfully blind, or is it that we just don’t see? Is this a moral problem or a visual one? Consider these examples: In his travels, the 18th Century explorer,…
Diving permission for human fatigue
Someone once asked Thérèse of Lisieux if it was wrong to fall asleep while in prayer. Her answer: “Absolutely not. A little child is equally pleasing to her parents, awake or asleep – probably more when asleep!” That’s more than a warm, cute answer. There’s a wisdom in her reply that’s generally lost to us,…
Giving up on fear
A friend of mine shares this story. He was an only child. When he was in his late twenties, still single, building a successful career and living in the same city as his mother and father, his father died, leaving his mother widowed. His mother, who had centred her life on her family and on…
Unfinished relationships
A colleague of mine, a clinical therapist, shares this story: A woman came to him in considerable distress. Her husband had recently died of a heart attack. His death had been sudden and at a most inept time. They’d been happily married for 30 years and, during all those years, had never had a major…
What will heaven be like?
Andrew Greeley once suggested that we might profitably meditate on the following vision of heaven: The condition of physical ecstasy and emotional satisfaction which results from sexual intercourse between two people who are deeply in love is the best anticipation currently available to us of our permanent condition in the resurrected state. “The powerful inspirational…
The illusion of self-sufficiency
A number of years ago, I attended the funeral of a man who died at the age of ninety. From every indication, he had been a good man, solidly religious, the father of a large family, a man respected in the community, and a man with a generous heart. However, he had also been a…